1. Claim of Priority
This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/545,308, filed on 10 Oct. 2006 entitled “GENERATING AN ORDER PLAN FOR A SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORK” which is a divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/925,149, filed on 8 Aug. 2001 and entitled “GENERATING AN ORDER PLAN FOR A SUPPLY CHAIN NETWORK”, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,177,827 which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/238,377 filed 6 Oct. 2000 and entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ORDER BY ORDER SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNING INCORPORATING DYNAMIC LEARNING”. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/545,308, U.S. Pat. No. 7,177,827, and U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/238,377 are commonly assigned to the assignee of the present application. The disclosure of related U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/545,308, U.S. Pat. No. 7,177,827, U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/238,377 are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure as if fully set forth herein.
2. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of supply chain networks and more specifically to generating an order plan for a supply chain network.
3. Background of the Invention
In a supply chain network, orders may be planned to satisfy item requests from one or more customers. Item requests may have different priorities. For example, an item request from a more important customer may have a higher priority than an item request from a less important customer. Planning a higher priority item request, however, may result in an infeasible period for a lower priority item request during which material or capacity is not available for the lower priority item request. For example, an upstream portion of a supply chain for a part required for the manufacture of a lower priority item may not be plannable due to one or more constraints such as a material or storage constraint. As a result, planning orders that satisfy requests of different priorities while minimizing planning time poses a challenge for supply chain network managers.